Ok, so, this is something that I've bee thinking about lately, after trying extensively to try and come up with an item and equipment model that maximizes efficiency and ease of use while at the same time allowing for as much customization as possible... I've drawn some inspiration from games as disparate as WoW, GTA, Divinity, 7 Days to Die, Borderlands.. even CoD and Battlefield... And well... I've come to a crisis of concept.

First, the backgroundd...

Morrowind's era of items and customization is neither realistic, nor elegant, but allows variety. Skyrims minimizes variety but is easy and requires little in the way of tracking equipables. Both have advantages and disadvantages, of course, and ESO in many ways solves the problem with its equipment slots and motifs...

But it uses bog-standard MMO mechanics, and it's a rather popular hope that TES will adopt location damage in the future, which complicates ESO's design. So in trying to find a solution, I came up with 5 Armour Slots (along with 6 Clothing clots and 2 'hands' ) . Each of these 5 pieces of equipment (Head, Right Arm, Left Arm, Chest, Legs) consists of 2 components, which can be made in various styles, and are combined together to become the equipable item. A Gauntlet and a Spaulder combine to form equipable arm armour, for instance. Combined with colour tints for various materials, rather than set textures, this would allow for near infinite variety in appearance.

Now, this is where the quandary began. While looking at this concept, I thought back to the Daedric helms of Morrowind. Different faces and designs for different helms, rather than a single generic. Dunmer wouldn't make use of a single visor design for their helms, would they?

I then started considering weapons in Borderlands and 7 Days to Die, which are assembled of 'parts' with set effects, allowing for a huge variety of component combinations and a staggering variety of weapons. Then you have GTA, with is bewildering selection of clothes, hats, masks, tattoos, glasses etc.

The lack of overal impact these visuals have made me think of Transmogrification in WoW and Diablo 3. And even of the totally irrelevant aesthetic modifications of Halo, CoD and Battlefield which do nothing but change knee pads, pouches, glasses etc...

Then there are dyes, do-dads, glyphs, sigils, ribbons... And this is just for attire and weapons!

More modern character designers let you control weight, muscle, gut size, sometimes even posture. Mods for Skyrim have already shown the system can handle more detailed facial alterations, and ESO gives more weight and body controls. Newer tech demo's have shown tattoo and scar models which allow you to place them yourself, and then autoadjust for the surface and lighting.

And then there's furnature! FF11 had a dozen varieties of table, 7 Days has at least 4 beds... There's no mechanism to really decorate your space in TES, but should there be?

Which brings me to the question... If there ever enough visual customization? Does it ever become a burden? Or is this the type of thing where 'enough' is never achieved, and variety for its own sake is self-fulfilling, right down to different buttons on the same shirt.